The Wealth You Already Own — Acres of Diamonds

The guide finally states his moral outright: Ali Hafed could have found acres of diamonds by digging his own cellar or wheat fields instead of dying broke in a foreign land. Conwell matches the parable with two real cases. A California rancher, chasing rumors of gold in 1847, sells his land to Colonel Sutter and leaves for good, just before Sutter's daughter discovers gold flakes in the sifted sand of their own mill stream, a strike eventually worth thirty-eight million dollars.

A Pennsylvania farmer decides to leave farming for the coal-oil business up in Canada, but his cousin refuses to hire him until he actually understands the trade. The farmer studies oil for months, then sells his farm for $833 and moves north. The buyer soon finds that a plank the farmer had wedged across the back brook for twenty-three years, meant only to keep cattle from a foul-looking scum, had been quietly damming back a flood of coal oil the state geologists later valued at a hundred million dollars, and later still at a billion.

Conwell closes with a third case: a young Massachusetts mining engineer, top of his class at Yale, is offered a raise from $15 to $45 a week and a professorship. Insulted that the jump was not gradual, he quits on the spot, telling his mother a man with his brain should not work for $45 a week. Mother and son sell their home and move to Wisconsin chasing gold and silver mines. He takes a new job at $15 a week again, with a share of any mine he might discover for the company. He never finds one, and Conwell loses track of him entirely.